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box of pages just as I’d handed over my previous novels, then I assumed the usual defensive crouch as I waited to hear from publishers. Always, in the past, ecstatic letters had gone out to my agent, assuring us both that I was gifted and that my work was promising, and then rejecting us both. (I had written these letters myself, in my editorial assistant job, so I recognized them for what they were: simply the approved publishing language and format for “We didn’t love it. Good-bye.”) But this time there was a different script. A small but respected publisher of erotica liked the book. He bought the book. Then he published the book. In due course, publishers in other countries liked and bought and published the book. And once, a Hollywood producer, who likewise liked the book, decided to make a film out of it. (In retrospect, I’m actually glad this film never materialized.) When my author copies arrived, I promptly hid them, and I never reread or even looked at the novel again. In fact I more or less forgot that it even existed, except when the royalty checks arrived. (Even all these years later, it remains the only one of my books to earn out its advance and pay royalties.)
    Years went by, and I wrote other books, which were published under my own name. For these novels my rule became that sex scenes would only occur if they could not possibly be avoided, and perhaps this inescapable quality helped get me over the hump when it came time to write them. Even so, and even given the fact that these scenes were downright tame when compared to my sex novel, I found them harrowing. That was my name on the manuscript, for one thing. And those were my characters, not always lovable but lovingly created. They were whole people whom I’d made, and they were taking their clothes off in public! To get myself through these scenes, I made rules about what could not be said. I would not use clinical language— penis, vagina, clitoris, for example, which smelled of the dissection lab. I would not use the kinds of euphemisms that appeared in romance novels and were too silly to take seriously. I would also not use colloquialisms like cock or dick, which, for me, killed the mood. So what was left? Merely: what the characters, in flagrante delicto, are thinking.
    For this approach, which was not, after all, planned, but only a result of eliminating things I was unwilling to say, I realized belatedly that I had an unlikely source to acknowledge. Many years before, I had been vacationing at a seaside resort in Mombasa, Kenya, with my parents and sister, in a hotel filled with people I might now refer to as “Eurotrash,” but who at the time seemed to me impossibly so-phisticated teenagers. My parents, somewhat uncharacteristically, had allowed my sister and me to attend the evening’s social event, a big noisy disco, at which I uncomfortably danced with an older guy from France or Spain or some other exotic place (history does not record this detail). I, naturally, was extremely uncomfortable to be dancing with a stranger in a mostly unbuttoned shirt (Prude!) and more than a little concerned that he would discover I was twelve years old, so I took off when the music ended and went to hide in the bathroom.
    Down the hall, in a darkened room, a movie was playing, and I stopped in the open doorway to look. The scene under way was absolutely wanton: an orgy, in fact. I stood dumbfounded in the doorway, watching, and when the setting changed, I went inside and sat down.
    The film was The Seven Minutes, an adaptation of the novel by Irving Wallace, which I would read a few years later as a teenager. It tells the story of an obscenity trial in California, in which a courageous bookseller faces charges for selling a supposedly licentious novel, also entitled The Seven Minutes . The seven minutes in question occur as the Lady Chatterley-esque heroine is in bed with her lover, and the focus of the novel-within-a-novel are the thoughts